understand until we feel it otherwise it is just dry academic and factual and i think through portraying a character we can somehow identify with where we are more able to understand and with no field of the remarkable fact of my parents having been the only journalist who met him and i did hear my parents talk about this strange guy and then i started thinking that we've been talking about the parallel between the two and this american played such a huge role in the last chapter and he wasn't at all known. we know about a british spy that we didn't know about who in some ways did probably more damage when you read the book you will be appalled how he basically destroyed his own family and never said sorry. thank you all very much. we have one more. do we have time for one more? >> we can take one more. >> thank you for this fascinating for him. was their adopted daughter ever bitter about the path her parents took her down flex >> she wasn't a bitter person. she considered herself a fortunate person and even considered the prison to have ae given her a tremendous perspective on life. she adored her biological parents and her father unfortunately died during the war but she and her mother were very close. she was a remarkable character. the story you generally encounter in fiction but she was real. so thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] good evening. i am from the presidential library. we are all glad you are here especially because not only is this a top flick that i find fascinating regardless of how many books have been written about him, and surprisingly this is the first of three that deal with roosevelt or his administration that we are going to have over the next few weeks but i think it is also neat for us to have a pulitzer prize-winning author to talk about it and i think that there is probably no better way to introduce a pulitzer prize-winning author dan with another pulitzer prize-winning author. please join me in welcoming hank. [applause] thank you, tony and the jimmy carter library and museum and the georgia center for the buck. i hadn't known until i arrived i was going to be the introducer, but i am happy to say that probably very few people around have known joe as long as i ha have. arguably for 67 years. you say how could that possibly be. she was a new yorker, i'm from alabama. how could that be? is because our mothers or sisters. so we are first cousins removed by many states, new york and alabama. i have to say that my career in journalism is to enlarge part i'm certain to my mother's jealousy of her older sister and the fact that her eldest son was doing great journalism across the world for "the new york times" and she thought he will never be a doctor or a lawyer, maybe you can be a journalist and so that's what i did. so as a child i followed as he went across the world and went to burma as a fulbright and then went to south africa for "the new york times" in 1964 and then years later when he went back which led to his book move your shadow that won the pulitzer prize. he had earlier done the introduction and the coffee for a book out of south africa about ernest cole and as many of you know, he later did the book on his time in south africa and now he has this fantastic book the last month of franklin roosevelt tropin south quite a few times to do research and i am more than honored and pleased to be able to introduce not only a great journalist and former executive editor of "the new york times," but my cousin. [applause] [inaudible] [laughter] >> he did a book called omaha blues which is a memoir and one time he sat with me and my co-author on our book called the race speech and said what's the working title of the book and i said at the race beat and he gave me this weird look and said sounds like a book about motown. i said yo you have a lot of nere is the former executive editor has published a memoir called omaha blues criticizing my title. [laughter] >> thank you, cousin. [laughter] i suppose i could make one up about how nice it is to be in georgia to talk about a book that tells a story that ends in georgia but then sadly in georgia but i also really don't have an answer to the question i am the most often asked about the book on franklin roosevelt's life. the question is how i got to the subject in the first place. i was a foreign correspondent. i wasn't deeply involved in american politics until i became an editor. and while i knew of his greatness and importance, the awkward truth is i can't remember how i got to the book. it's probably a reflection on my stage in life. at some point after my previous book, gandhi came out and i read something that pointed me to this very different non- conspicuous spiritual figure. it wasn't a book and it may have been nothing more than a paragraph or sentence in an article. whatever it was started me it se thinking and then poking around in libraries and eventually led me to the franklin roosevelt presidential library in hyde park new york. but i found myself wondering about was the puzzle of the most intimate thoughts on the question of his own mortality. the ultimate existential question in broader terms the puzzle of what it was that kept our longest serving president going after all those years of stress and in the midst of the most destructive war in human history. was it a sense of duty or self-sacrifice, or was it as we now sometimes say on this sensitive end-of-life topic was he in denial as most of us are, day in and day out. there was one connection i couldn't entirely put aside. i was already when i was talking about fdr years older than he was at the end of his life. he was just 63 on the day that he died april 12, 1945. i'm old enough to remember that day the way many of us render november 22, 1963 and all of us i suppose remember september 11, 2001. on the today long ago, my favorite radio serial captain midnight was interrupted by republican from georgia. this is how they did things before social media. a deep voice came out of a box that said we interrupt this program to bring you an important news bulletin, president roosevelt is dead or words to that effect. these were followed by music and captain midnight didn't return for several days. it could be my interest in the subject started their come it could be but i don't think so. i think i was doing what i have done through a long career either sensing a story that seemed to me hadn't been fully told or at least hadn't been told to my satisfaction as i did my reading. at the time span i covered in my book was ostensibly quite riveting just 17 months, not quite a year and a half a as i finally conceived of measuring it from the day franklin roosevelt left the white house in november 1943 to sail to taiwan to meet the soviet dictator and from there until that fateful day obviously those 117 days can tell his whole story. it's necessary to see something of a big picture. you can't begin to understand roosevelt's determination to engage stalin face-to-face as he did for the first time without referring back to his experiences as a second-tier official in the woodrow wilson administration during world war i which left him with a determination this time around to shape the postwar order as he leaves wilson failed to do in his day. he blamed wilson both for the diplomatic respects and political mistakes and failing to get the league of nations covered in the treaty of oversight for the united states congress. even pearl harbor, roosevelt was preoccupied with the question of how this might be accomplished. she had no answer. this pragmatic politician didn't deal with proud answers that he had goals. the question of how he could succeed where wilson failed was never far from his mind. even before we got into the war, roosevelt was breeding there for about what would follow and how the united states would carry the burden that was rejected in wilson's day and that was always on his mind. i think i can personally handle stolen better than that for an office or my state department. he wrote to churchill early on and properly handled might be the key to the war or this wouldn't be a sure thing. it was a proposition to be tested and tehran was to be the first test. the chronology has to be bent somewhat and sketched and if we are to find meaning in the place for lucy rutherford in his last month. the drama is in the fact that it was lucy not eleanor who was with him when he was felled by a hemorrhage on the brain in this brings. by 17 months, huge events involving this president the d-day landings in normandy and the largest assault over and likely when you think about it too remains a when you see hundreds of thousands of troops hitting a beach ever again given the nature of modern weaponry the decision to proceed with building the atomic bomb the long postponed announcement that he would stand for a fourth term in 1944 dropped by starry eyed ticket favored in the little-known senator. a hard-fought campaign at a time when no other democrat was given a chance of winning sooner followed by the gavel on the counterattack which proved to be virtually the last gasp of the third reich and by long trip into crimea for a second meeting with stalin and churchill leading to the agreement on the formation of the united nations and the soviet intervention on our side against japan in the pacific for and a compromise on poland but hardly stood a chance roosevelt himself headlong recognized since they already occupied the country that's to mention a few highlights and by taking truman as the understudy and dwight eisenhower to be the supreme commander in europe, both surprised choices in their day can fdr and as time would show shows not only his successor but his successors. all these matters have been written about at length over and over all giving rise to controversies that can't be deemed settled that roosevelt himself tends to receive these standard accounts. he was too easily presumed by the writers during their studies long after the fact to have been a dying man losing his grip on affairs in the midst of all of these events. after all heeded the. yet somehow he managed to remain a convincing president almost to the end. his actual medical condition was never disclosed in his lifetime and his medical records disappeared and were presumably destroyed afterwards. a thought occurred to me the other day and should have occurred to me when i was writing to ask myself whether he had anything to do with that i don't mean after he died but -- [laughter] in preparation and i think the answer may be yes. he took care as he always had to cover his tracks and not just when it came to matters medical. this was the most private of public men. charming, outgoing to the point of being locations but also guarding and making hillary clinton seen by contrast a self revelation. [laughter] he met the press regularly normally twice a week, something she's just learning to do but almost always on and off the record basis. the official count on the press conference was just astounding during his 12 plus years as president there were 998 of them. the last one a week before his death ended with the president reminded journalists that everything that he had said in the claim for extra votes in the general united nations had been off the record said he was still in good form. those that were later fought to have been his confidants got only peeks into his thinking which in a way is understandable since his thinking was never fixed. it was in a constant state of flux and never static as the political climate changed. the president doesn't think i'm eleanor once said. he decides. i think of it almost like great chess players who can play three or four at one time were some of those handheld games where you have a little ball going around. i think roosevelt politics on his mind and the war on his mind and diplomacy on his mind and lucy and eleanor. i think all of these things were constant and he was looking for an outcome on any particular one that made sense to him. he knew where he wanted to get that he didn't know how to get there. he was simultaneously a visionary and a political schemer ready to test the hypothesis like a scientist in a lab or an entrepreneur. frances perkins, the first cabinet office said he had a four track mind. he also had a habit of procrastination dedicated to keeping his diplomatic political and personal options open as long as he possibly could. he could stand on all sides of an issue where it suited his purpose. visitors with opposing points of view would leave his office where they persuade the president to see things their way some noticing he made no commitments and had in fact changed their own expectations of the plan, highly principled he was routinely duplicitous in his tactics, roosevelt once said that he can lie if it would help win the war. the british military historian called him by far the most enigmatic theater of world war ii. it applies on the political homefront. on the same key simultaneously led to a pair of candidates for vice president who had been close to him and hoped to become his running mate, and i'm speaking of henry wallace and jimmy burns. he simultaneously led them to believe that they had the support for the nomination while working all the while to block them. on behalf of the third man to whom he never directly spoke he called him a man capable of looking in one direction while going in another. in the sport for months, his instinct could be justified on the basis of a national security under a supposedly voluntary censorship agreement with reporters covering the white house and in the news organizations they represent it. the actual whereabouts were treated as a state secret not just when he traveled abroad to casablanca or tehran but also in the united states. he was actually away from the white house in this period more than the inmates. congress, the public at large and cabinet members often have no idea where he was. he made 21 trips to hyde park in those 17 months on a presidential train that departed late at night from the basement to the bureau and then to the white house driving in his specially outfitted railway car called the ferdinand magellan which they said was the heaviest because of all of the armored plating. it's still the heaviest passenger car on the american rails which now if you happen to be in miami it can be visited just outside the zoo of the gold coast railway museum and it is in terrific shape. it gives you a vivid sense of roosevelt's wife, not just his life on the rails but how come find he felt in the white house with people coming to visit him all the time and why he felt a sense of liberation just being out there on his train riding across the country. he couldn't walk in either case but he felt free on the train more than he did in his office. in april, 1944 he spent the month in what amounted to medical rehab in south carolina in the low country in georgeto georgetown. all that time the closest "the new york times," my old paper that i had nothing to di do witt then came to disclosing his whereabouts, the closest they came to disclosing their whereabouts on the condition was to say the cause and the brief inconspicuous dispatch that was played very deep in the paper that he was somewhere in the south. [laughter] a lion and a biography of lincoln helped to give this subject a shop. he said it had bee they had bees ambition to produce a biography written from lincoln's point of view using information and ideas available to him seeking to explain rather than to judge and after some months i concluded with reporters that there was ample room despite all that has been written. the opening was there in part because some of his most dedicated biographers and scholars who have followed his career never got to the end of his life. he exhausted them. arthur sloss and sure was still in the 1930s after three volumes when it ended. davis, another roosevelt biographer died after his first three volumes which took his subject through to 1943. the earliest scholar to plan a multibillion treatment started a fifth volume but left it unfinished. meanwhile, new information and insight surfaced over the years. there were critical nodes in civilian life and a specialist eventually published in a medical journal 25 years after his patient died. a noted surgeon he founded the clinic now for a major medical center was called in as a consultant on his condition and later left a message for posterity dictated by no coincidence a day before fdr declared a fourth term. he said he wouldn't be able to survive it. much later after a battle over the issue of patient confidentiality with the library lined up on the side, the letter finally came into the public domain in 2007 less than ten years ago. most hopeful was a hudson valley neighbor and a cousin who spend more time than anyone else including his wife eleanor. she then survived in a half-century always insisting hf century always insisting she was frequently asked by scholars and always insisting she saved no notes or correspondence. she died in 1991 and in her hundredth year after her death it was hauled from under her bed in her dilapidated mansion in new york and inside was her copious diary which jeffrey already the author of two books on roosevelt added into a quite moving volume, somewhat revealing title to closest companion right at conjunction with the white house logs that can now be followed online at the fdr library website. it supplies the music for the president's last months. a kind of up and down in which his hopes, worries and calculation find telling and highly variable expression. these and similar discoveries made it possible to adopt the standard in a book about this climactic period from his point of view to explain his thinking rather than judge and. in the simplest terms, to tell a story. reviewing the choices with which he was confronted with which he was confronted through his eyes it seems clear to me they didn't present themselves as choices. at the end of 1943 from his return, he appeared to be in good health. everyone comments about how great he looks in the photographs. the timeline matters. three months later his cardiologist diagnosed him it wasn't revealed for 26 years. there were then only two months remaining in six weeks more to the democratic convention. at one time he may have wondered whether an early end might give him an opportunity to bow out that didn't come soon enough given those interlocking timetables from the invasion into the convention he was in no position when you think about it to look for an exit for his successor and he couldn't say when he still had eight months to govern his third term i am out of here. since 1944, we have amended the constitution to provide for what to do when you are unable to assert that there was no such provision. he basically had to re-sign i suppose. carrying on with a mor was a mos choice than getting out and i think that he was trapped. he told himself and a few others he could re-sign if it's got to be too much. a couple vignettes stick out in my mind when i consider his valor. one is a visit he paid to the boards of a naval hospital above honolulu and the other severely wounded survivors of the assault on an island. stopping and chatting a bit with the occupants so they could draw courage. the commander in chief had been able to take a step unassisted for the quarter of a century. it would prove to be the final time and he was transferred which he spoke of the seated position. without a hint of self-pity it makes it a lot easier not to have to carry 10 pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs. this was the first acknowledgment in those 12 plus presidential years of his infirmity. frances perkins called it one more spiritual inner victory for him and his long adjustment. staunchly anti-roosevelt columnist in the daily news named john o'donnell, quite a good writer but quite a poisonous writer from fdr wrote that his political foes stood by the illusion to what had previously been unmentionable. he said it's an honest appreciation of the undoubted personal courage of the man that is about to tell them what he had done in the name of the republic and threw away some of the fumes of personal bitterness. applause swept up the chamber from both sides of you. however there is the obvious thought that we don't hear such. maybe before next january 20, mitch mcconnell with the likes of sean hannity will find something decent to say about barack obama but don't bear on it. thank you. [applause] >> joe is going to answer questions here for a few minutes. as i said earlier, please wait for the microphone to get to you. who has a question? weevils start right here on the front row. >> thank you for an incredible book. i wanted to mention and get your thoughts. can you talk about how -- >> it was really difficult and it involved a long sail across the ocean that wasn't so difficult but he enjoyed being on a ship and then it involved a seven hour flight from the island to the newest airplane in the fleet but still it traveled at about one third the speed of an air force one today. that's was followed immediately by a five-hour trip over roads that have been ravaged up into the mountains. he hadn't been in good shape when he set out and he was exhausted. great efforts were made by the doctors that accompanied him into the surgeon genera surgeone navy and the admiral and the cardiologist i mentioned and his eldest child, his daughter to keep them out of unnecessary discussions. he attended all of the formal meetings in the heads of government and attended all the steak dinners. it was a rigorous eight days that when the meetings ar were t in session they tried to keep. for the most part, he did very well in terms of being able to engage the subject and he was the decision-maker on the side. there were two views of what happened. the standard political one that was heard over the years more or less from the right and the george w. bush in the evil axis speech when he talked about the disgrace that the others are the scholars that looked closely at what happened and they felt he got the scholarly consensus. and on the un he did very well on getting the soviet forces to enter world war ii in the pacific up to that point russia had a nonaggression treaty with the japanese and even on the questions of the various issues to deal with europe. the most difficult was the future of poland and where the boundaries should be. stalin had conceded and roosevelt haven't gone that far. he wanted to remain silent until after the election but as i said, poland was occupied by the army and nobody advocated sending american forces. it was inconceivable. so there was a sort of byplay between him and stalin were he seemed to read behind the lines that he was pressing for. it was a statement in acceptable language of the future of poland should be that it should be an intra- call state -- in trouble state and democratically chosen. this was all agreed to and signed in the communiqué [inaudible] ♪ that's not me. roosevelt didn't regard the matter as closed. after all he doesn't planning to die in a month. he was taking it to the plaintiff could be open for further discussion and maybe deals could be made. but he wasn't satisfied. during the discussion he did suffer a sort of medical setback. his heart had in a rhythmic beat that hadn't manifested before and there was a concern and he was kept in bed for part of an afternoon and early evening to help him get through but the best with this is probably the american diplomat who was a russian interpreter. he testified that roosevelt was always on top of the game and alert throughout the meetings. most american diplomats who were there felt that it had all gone up pretty well. they didn't read the subtext that got darker as the months and years war on. i think that he had a grip on what was happening more than anybody else. >> do you feel if roosevelt lived a little bit longer he would have read ray truman into the thinking and had he lived a little bit longer to what extent do you think his policies might have been different from truman. roosevelt didn't read anybody into his thinking and i tried to describe the nature of his thinking and he doesn't think, he decides. that applies here. i don't think that he knew exactly what he was going to do but he was maneuvering towards the goals and i don't know what he would have been able to say at that point because the way that his mind works it was always recalibrating and reconsidering a constant process and i suppose he could have but he didn't. it's not apparent that he spoke about that in clear terms. the degree to which he shaped policy on his own is quite amazing that the standards of leader presidencies. there was no chief of staff at the white house in those days were social security council, there was no social security adviser. that's point number one. point number two is the vice president up to that point if anybody happens to have any memory or some idea of a musical there is a famous character called alexander keith's caricature of the vice presidency had been in american history. no vice presidents ever had an office in the white house that has been the case the last 30 to 40 years. in fact i think president cart carter, vice president mondale was the first one to do so. no vice president was ever a regular companion up until that time. the vice president hung out at the capitol and presided over the senate. he was not part of the national security team because in some sense there was no national security team. it was a simpler structure for the time that had already ceased to be. if the president had decide pred to bring harry truman into it it would have been a good thing. it would have been a great innovation in the statecraft. he didn't do it. the third thing to say about that, they were in washington. roosevelt was inaugurated and left almost immediately and was away for five weeks, came back to address congress and went to hyde park. terry truman and franklin roosevelt were as president and vice president were in washington together at the same time 21 days during the first term. you could have said maybe he would have done it later but there was no sign of that. finally, on the last point what difference would it have made if roosevelt told harry truman the pros and cons of what he was considering all he would be handing over his mouth some blueprint for what to do later but the problem and he would have to still make the decision. the decision was going to be made by the decisions on war and peace and future relations in the soviet union were going to be made by whoever the president happens to be at the time that needed to be made and roosevelt had aims but not a blueprint. >> so that's my reaction to the whole issue. i haven't given a talk on this book without being asked that question. but truman himself testified, i think truman himself only talked to her three times after the inauguration. there were always other people in the room and they quoted him as saying they never talked about the things. >> was there anything on that last trip that you found out in the anecdote or piece of information that surprised you about that last trip with the relationship and people in warm springs was there anything different about that? maybe he was just so much sicker. >> that seems to be the case. his chief secret service men named mike bradley later wrote or had ghost written a memoir in which he said when he lifted roosevelt out of the car of course he had always to be lifted out of cars usually he would put a hand on the door or the roof of a car to help the transfer of his body and he said that on arrival in the springs for the first time he was just a dead weight. he was quite exhausted for the first few days and then picked up and started traveling around especially when he had people entertain and he had three or four women fare including lucy at the end. he said some quite witty things along the way that he was working on his speech for the san francisco conference from the united nations and he had just done a speech to be broadcast for the jefferson dinners democratic function which was to have occurred a day after he died. so he was certainly engaged, but there was a general sense that he was fading and people in his entourage had a very loyal he felt he is good to pull through and make it were now beginning to wonder whether he would. he was going on the night of the day that he died and he was supposed to attend a minstrel show at the center and of course it would have been a segregated event although there was one black performer and accordion player who performed there about who was scheduled to perform their. but i don't know that anything surprised me. but when you wind the details up it's very touching especially. i don't think i've discovered anything new about that except if you follow the timeline. he only went there twice during world war ii. i think that he was in warm springs. lucy whose husband had died the previous year had an estate in the force country which wasn't right nearby but was a reasonable drive and roosevelt was there to be accessible to her and that explains why. i don't know how many of you have been to the little white house. it's now a georgia state park and it's worth visiting. the simplicity of the house has columns outside and it looks almost grand. when you are inside it is just plain paneled with pinewood. it's very touching and there is a nice museum including a portrait that was being painted of him by lucy's friend. >> to the timdo we have time foe question? [inaudible] >> do you think that roosevelt was in a way a victim of world war ii and that he died in service to this country? >> a lot of people drew that conclusion when he died. at least one newspaper they use to listen daily usually for the community that was being served. the atlanta paper into the new york would have to new york. but at least one paper headed in its list with franklin roosevelt commander-in-chief, resident ref the white house, and there is i don't think i can paraphrase it but i ended that chapter with a quote from a surprising source, which is senator robert taft that is known as mr. republican. he is somebody that ha have oppd everything domestic and foreign and his father had been president and he had the ambition of running for president. and if all o of all of the stats that were issued, i thought his was the most effective and if i could borrow your book i will read it because he was a very partisan source. >> the president's death removed the greatest figure of our time at the very climax of his career. it shocks the world to which his words on actions were more important than those of any other man. he died a healer of the war for he literally worked himself to death for the service of the american people. it's interesting. of course this is a war people were patriotic and as i sor sord set the end of my talk, it's inconceivable that anybody would rise to the level of perception about the head of an opposing party today. >> it's a great opportunity for you to get a copy of the book the final battle. but even more so, it's a great opportunity for you to get him to sign it. he will be signing books in the library. let's thank him one more time. [applause] [inaudible conversations] .. >> >> and making efforts to understand to send that information back to washington.